Thank you, thank you President Muhlenfeld. It’s really a pleasure to be here on this absolutely beautiful day, on this very, very special occasion. For a century -- this marks your 100th anniversary of graduating classes. Sweet Briar has produced leaders in every field in the ranks of leadership of our country. Doctors, researchers, corporate CEOs, and entrepreneurs, dance company and theatre directors, humanitarian group leaders and volunteers. But as your president noted, this has a special place in my heart because my oldest sister Rosemary graduated from Sweet Briar 40 years ago this year. I did go elsewhere, first to Bryn Mawr where your president-elect also went and then to Yale. And I realized that at my Yale graduation as I sat as you do now what made Yale really special is that they do not allow anyone outside of Yale speak at graduation.

So though I’m deeply honored to be here, I will try to remain true to Yale’s tradition and remember that today is your day. So the first thing I want to say to you is congratulations for all the hard work and the learning and the growing that you did on your path to the prize of a Sweet Briar diploma. The sweetest successes in life aren’t achieved alone, and you have parents, family and friends who encouraged and supported you. And I’d like to call on you graduates to stand and turn and applaud them. It’s their day too. I have a few life-learned tips for your road ahead. But I’m actually not sure you’ll need them. Because you are embarking on the rest of your life with two huge assets - one is the superb education you’ve received here, and that you have earned here, and the resiliency and fiber that my experience as a journalist has taught me that most women have. In 35 years of reporting, I’ve covered women at the pinnacle of political leadership and in the pit of poverty, and I have become amazed at the grit that women show, their ability to persevere and endure in the face of overwhelming odds. I wanted to give you a few examples of how your fellow sisters across the world do persevere in the face of tremendous challenges.

Three years ago, actually on my, I think on my second overseas trip I went to Darfur, Sudan where 200,000 Africans had already been killed in ethnic conflict and a million driven from their homes. We helicoptered in a small UN plane to this remote desert outpost to find scores of African women who had walked 25, 50, 100 miles in 110 degree heat from their burned out villages. Some had been raped by militiamen, others had watched their daughters raped, their fathers and oldest sons killed. And yet there they were, sitting under these small makeshift shelters. And as they told me their horrific stories, just horrific stories, I have to say I was amazed and I thought: “what keeps these women going? Why didn’t they just curl up and die as they watched their life being literally burned up?” And I realized the answer was the children. They had been able to escape with their children. They were all around us, laughing, their faces open and smiling and welcoming to me. I was awestruck that the women who had endured such horror could not only make it to a safe place but could maintain the joy in their children’s lives and eyes.

Now at the other end of the spectrum, a year later I the covered the presidential election in France, and that was Nicholas Sarkozy against Segolene Royal. Now she was the daughter of a retired military officer who didn’t believe women should be educated at all. He said that his daughters should not be educated but she managed to get educated. She’d then raised four children as a single mother, and now here she was a socialist candidate for President. She did lose - but not because she was a woman. She lost because the voters weren’t buying the socialist platform that year—actually French voters told me that they wanted to vote for a woman. They said that, after all, the British voted for Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s and you know the French were always very competitive with the British. They just weren’t ready for her program platform. What I found so encouraging, ladies, was that she was at this pinnacle of achievement without being an iron-lady like Maggie Thatcher. She was quintessentially French, and I mean beautiful, feminine with a fabulous clothes sense, elegant; a committed socialist that looked like she had just stepped out the pages of Vogue. We should all inspire to combine the two. Not necessarily the socialist part, but the achievement without giving up the essence of our femininity.

Then while reporting in Afghanistan earlier this year, I finally decided to do a piece on the status of women - in-between patrolling in armor with soldiers in armored humvees or again helicoptering into dangerous outposts along the Pakistan border - I did spend time talking to ordinary women. Though this women had been quote -- “liberated from the Taliban by the Afghan War” -- what I found was not encouraging. Women there in Afghanistan are seen not just as a different gender, but as a different species—if they’re seen at all. In most of the villages you don’t see women in the streets except in those baby blue burkas that cover everything head-to-toe --- blue burkas with this little latticed slit. And even in the streets of Kalbu, any women that you may see are usually accompanied by their man or are certainly covered again by these burkas and yet the women there persevere.

I went to a one day program run by a western relief group that pays women a stipend of $27 a day and they are able to learn some kind of craft that will help them earn money -- like making jewelry or sewing and also they are taught basic concepts like that they have basic rights.

Most of these women had been sold into marriage at age 13, 14, 15… $140 was the price of one. They were shipped off to the husbands’ families, the husband and his family, where they were really treated as chattel, servants, baby-makers, fieldworkers, hired hands. Many of them had been physically and emotionally abused and some still were being. And yet they’d gotten themselves into this program. And now that they were bringing home a little money, they weren’t being as badly abused, they weren’t beaten as often.

But one woman who was a seamstress was using her stipend to send her little daughters to school - -they were in third and fifth grade. And she said to me “I am uneducated. I am illiterate. I am nothing. But my daughters will be doctors, they can be MPs, they will be teachers.” So these women had dreams but they deferred them to their daughters because they knew that education was the key.

I also went to meet three young college girls who had not been allowed to go to school up to age twelve because of the Taliban regime. But they managed to go to catch up in school by the time they were 18. We stood out on this rooftop and they did not wear headscarves and they talked very boldly about their dreams. One wants to be a business women. They are just your age, no they’re younger than you. But one wants to be a business woman, one wants to be a doctor, and one wants to be the President of Afghanistan. So, at the end, my Russian camera man said “well what about marriage, girls?” and they all said “Oh no. Not now.” And he said “well, what if your father, when you go home, says that he found a husband.” “We are just going to tell him no.” and then they said that they were not sure if they will ever get married. Because, as one said, “If I have a husband, he’ll make me give up my dream.”

They had no model for having both. The exciting thing is that for women, American woman, we can have both. As American women in the 21 st century, you can in fact have all three. You can have a career and a marriage, and children. But I won’t tell you that it is easy. It does involve conscious choices and trade-offs. And that’s the first lesson of post-college life, I’d like to impart. Having it all won’t just “work out”; you have to make it work out. I’ve been blessed to have the first two -- a fascinating career as a journalist and also a marriage to an absolutely wonderful man with whom I had a very deep partnership.

We were as much in love when he died last year as when we married decades before. I’ve been blessed with stepchildren, but I never had children of my own. And that is a major regret of my life. The reasons had to do with timing, career, biology—but mostly my failure to realize that time wasn’t infinite. I know this question is on your minds, because I counsel young recent graduates who come to work at the News Hours for a 6-month internship. The young men never ask me, but nearly all the young women do - which is how do I combine professional ambition with a personal life of meaning and satisfaction? My answer is, don’t short change one for too long for the other. As for the professional: the most important, as everyone will tell you, is that you must do it, discover your passion. What is it you really want to 40-50 hours a week? I know many of you are sitting there, thinking, “What is she talking about? I have no idea what I want to do.” Relax. You’re not alone. When I was a senior in college, my concept, my mental image was like I was hurtling towards a brick wall with no brakes. I had no idea what to do. I actually managed to get into a very prestigious law school, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer. So I deferred that.

So I headed for New York. And I wanted to write, so I got myself into District Magazine for an interview. I was taken to see the head researcher. Now I was a newly minted woman graduate of Yale but it was made clear to me that the only role for me there was to be a researcher for the male correspondents. I said thanks but no thanks. I did later, as your president said, end up at District Magazine as a correspondent, but I didn’t have the pleasure or the comfort of knowing that then. So I went to an employment agency, and got out the want ads, and pounded the pavement. They sent me to all these publishing houses -- some published diet books, another guides to your sex life, I mean very cheesy stuff and I was just in despair. Finally though, I was sent to Harper and Row Publishers, to this woman who ran the children’s book division - she was an inspirational figure. She was the one who got E.B. White to write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little for example. So I became her personal assistant; I managed her brilliant but totally disorganized work life, and managed to read and edit manuscripts on the side. After 18 months, I’d learned three crucial things about myself: one, that I could edit; two, that I could actually write without suffering the writer’s block of doing term papers; and three, that I didn’t want to work in a small office with the wonderful, but the still the same people, day after day.

So I decided to have another go at trying to be a journalist; this time at a small newspaper. And just as it is for you today, it was actually a very tough time to be looking for a job. OPEC had slapped on an oil embargo, and the president had imposed wage and price controls. But I heard about an opening at a small newspaper in New Hampshire, the Concord Monitor. A few days later—despite learning on the qt that the job had been filled - I went anyway. This was in pre-email days so they couldn’t head me off. I walked in and I tried to dazzle the editor. After trying to dazzle the managing editor with my energy and drive, I then listened as he called the editor of a smaller paper down the road. “I know we just stole your star reporter from you,” he said. “But I’ve got a live one for you. Her name’s Margaret Warner. She went to Yale. Yale-yeah, Yale. They had women this year.” So I drove over, and though the editor had dozens of applications on file, I got the job, I’m convinced, because I was a rarity -- a woman who’d gone to Yale. So being a woman even in my earlier days of my career had cut both ways for me. And I was finally on my way. So from this and the rest of my career and my life, I’ve come up with seven tips that I hope you’ll find useful - and reassuring.

1. A down economic time is actually a great time to be starting to look for a job in your 20’s. Unless you’re a trust fund baby, you haven’t lost anything. Your 401k hasn’t been decimated. Your home hasn’t dropped in value. You aren’t worrying about losing your job in a dying industry, because you don’t have one yet and the dying industry won’t hire you. You may have college loans, but I hope you don’t have any high interest credit card debts. It may be tougher to land that first job, but the only way for you is up.

2. You needn’t be paralyzed by the fact that you don’t know what your passion is. Do some day-dreaming about how you see yourself 5 years from now - not just your job, but the whole picture—the whole picture of your life - and get out there and do something that might lead to that.

3. Take chances. You’ll never have more freedom than you do now. And don’t fear making the “wrong move.” There are no wrong professional moves in your 20’s; I can’t emphasize that enough. Just take a step, start doing something, and then listen to your heart. If, after a time, you don’t wake up with a sense of expectation about the day, get out a journal, get out a diary, put a line down the middle, and on the left, everyday put down every moment, every conversation that you found interesting, stimulating, fun. On the right, put down anything that bored you or upset you. And after two weeks, just look at it and it will be crystal clear where the balance is and also it will be easier to decide the next move. I really can’t emphasize this enough - at your age, you don’t have to fear being trapped.

4. Don’t be afraid of failure. You hear that a lot but it is important. There will be times you fall short, or have setbacks or you even fail. I have certainly had those but I have found that every one of them is actually a learning moment - what they call a self-teaching moment.

5. Have the courage to define your own life. Again a true lesson - it is more important than ever in our fast-changing world. There are few jobs sectors left out there anyway in which the path to success or fulfillment is obvious or secure, just think about it. The world is being transformed before our eyes. so stay flexible, and define your own.

6. Above all, think about what it is you’ll actually be doing - not the title you’ll have, but the work itself. I had a professor in college, a drama critic, Richard Gilman, who liked to say, “Many people want to be writers. Not so many really want to write.” Don’t be seduced by the image of a job. I always flinch when a young person says to me, “I want to be on television.” “Oh really?” I think to myself. “And pray tell, what do you want to do on television?” Pursuing a job for its prestige rather than inner satisfaction is a path to unhappiness down the road.

7. Finally, save time and emotional energy for yourself. My colleague, Jim Lehrer, tells graduates, “keep a book of poetry by your bed.” For me, it’s not poetry. It’s a novel. At the end of a day of reading newspapers and magazine articles, foreign policy and congressional reports, I’m starved to escape into the world of the heart and the spirit. Maintain your emotional life on every front—make time for your friends, for involvement in your community and for your faith. In college, you have time for all that. But as you get older, as work becomes more demanding, you may marry, acquire children or aging parents, and a house to run—and ladies, make no mistake about it, the woman is still the “producer” of a couple’s life. There is a lot to run. Your inner life can get crowded out. So just as you take care of your body, your physical health and fitness - take care of your emotional and spiritual health. Don’t let it atrophy.

Good luck, God speed, and may you always have the sense of promise ahead that you have today.